Science fiction and fantasy specialist Del Rey Books is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, and to celebrate, the imprint is reissuing paperbacks of classic titles featuring smashing new cover art. We’re pleased to debut the first three right here on io9.

This has been a tough year. Pop culture let us down in many ways, even as our political system and our social institutions revealed a deeper seam of ugliness. But speculative fiction still offers us hope: not just optimism about human ingenuity, but actual reasons to look forward and keep our heads up.

This has been a really great year for science fiction, fantasy and horror books, taking us to fabulous worlds and opening our minds to new ideas and brilliant new characters. Here’s our list of the most amazing books we read this year.

MIT’s Technology Review has a bit of a secret: just about every year, they put together a science fiction edition titled Twelve Tomorrows. It’s one of the best collections of short science fiction out there, and you can now preorder the upcoming issue.

Two of the most celebrated authors in science fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson and Neal Stephenson, released epic novels this summer about our future lives in space. And yet both Robinson’s Aurora and Stephenson’s Seveneves are actually about why we may never be able to leave Earth behind.

Science fiction and fantasy offer a rich legacy of great books—but that abundant pile of reading material can also be daunting. So sometimes, it’s easier to fake it. We asked some of our favorite writers, and they told us the 10 books that everyone pretends to have read. And why you should actually read them.

“As the 21st century unfolds, science fiction increasingly comes to seem like a realist rather than a speculative genre,” says one essay/book review in the L.A. Review of Books. It’s just one of a few great pieces up at the LARB site right now, about the choice of futures we face: Mad Max versus Star Trek.

Want to know more about the mysterious Magic Leap and its plan to make virtual objects appear in the real world? Watch this fireside chat with three of the company’s leaders, including Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson. [MIT Tech Review]

Famed scifi author Neal Stephenson’s new novel Seveneves is out today, and one of the most exciting things about it is that it’s packed with realistic representations of space megastructures where humans live. We talked to Stephenson about his ideas, and have some exclusive art from Weta showing what they look like.

We all know that economists love science fiction — especially Isaac Asimov fan Paul Krugman. But science fiction and fantasy can also help teach ordinary people about the Dismal Science. Here are 22 great science fiction and fantasy stories that can help you make sense of economics.

With so many prominent scientists warning about the dangers of rogue artificial intelligence, and so many ethical concerns coming down the pike in A.I. research and computer science generally, how can computer experts educate themselves? By reading science fiction books.

Magic Leap's mysterious augmented reality tech promises to "bring magic back into the world." And now Neal Stephenson, who imagined the virtual Metaverse in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, has joined the company. He tells io9 why this technology may "demand a new way of thinking."

Sabering, or sabrage, is a champagne-opening art popularized at the time of Napoleon's military campaigns. In this video, Neal Stephenson, the author who gave us Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, shows that doing it properly requires not blunt force, but elegance, precision and a knowledge of physics.

Two years ago, beloved science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson launched a crowdfunding campaign to start making a realistic swordfighting game. The Clang Kickstarter notched more than $500,000 towards that end. But a game never materialized and, as announced today, people who backed Clang are starting to get their…

Tomorrow sees the publication of Hieroglyph, a book of optimistic science fiction spearheaded by Neal Stephenson's famous call to arms
. And we've got an exclusive excerpt from Madeline Ashby's weird, bracing short story, in which she imagines a world without border fences.